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Why companies keep pay a secret

A study by researchers at the University of California suggest employers have more to lose than to gain by publicizing employee salaries, according to Smart Money.

Workers who discover they make less than the median for their job might leave, while costly workers aren't more loyal by being paid more.

According to the article, "In experiments, human subjects proved willing to sacrifice potential rewards if they could block others from receiving superior rewards. In other words, subjects in many cases cared more about fairness than gain."

And on one website, it's more than just salaries that are published. According to siliconvalley.com, Glassdoor.com put these interview questions on its website that were directed to top tech candidates interviewing at Cisco Systems, Google and Facebook:

Why are manhole covers round? How would you figure out the number of kilowatt-hours required to boil a container of water? For a randomly ordered bucket of numbers 1 through 3,000 with one number missing, how would you detect which number is missing?

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